The present invention relates to a connection management system and a method for linking a connection management server in a thin client system.
In a conventional client-server formed system, a PC having a magnetic disk device or the like is used as a client terminal, but recently there are cases in which one user uses a plurality of PCs or one PC is shared for a plurality of businesses, because business is becoming more complicated, and as a result, the management cost of a client terminal is increasing, which is partially due to the need for more complicated software for a client terminal. Furthermore, the existence of such a storage device as a magnetic disk device in a client terminal increases the risk of information leakage.
This means that today, in some cases, a business system is constructed by a combination of a diskless terminal (such a storage device as a magnetic disk device is not equipped) or a terminal in which writing to a disk is disabled (hereafter called “thin client terminal”) and a server (hereafter called “thin client server”) where data is held, and where an operating system (OS) and business applications are executed.
A thin client server which executes business applications, that were once executed by a client terminal in a conventional client-server formed system, has a virtually constructed client as an execution unit (execution image) for each thin client terminal, and in the client, an OS, business applications and data, which are assigned by the thin client terminal for each connection, are installed. Generally a thin client server manages a plurality of thin client terminals, therefore a plurality of clients operate on a same thin client server.
In such a thin client system, a user at a thin client terminal connects to the client operating in a data center, for example, via a network, and executes applications on the client. Inputs required for executing the applications are executed via the thin client terminal, and the result of executing the applications is checked on the screen of the thin client terminal.
In a thin client system, a plurality of users may share a plurality of clients, and in order to improve system convenience, a structure is required when a user starts using the thin client system, a client that no other users are using is searched and assigned to the user, and connection is made from the thin client terminal to the assigned client. For user convenience, it is also important to minimize the operations required for connection. For this, a thin client connection management method is proposed, where a connection management server (or a connection management system having this connection management server) is installed, for example, and this connection management server manages the states of all the clients, searches and available clients according to the request from the thin client terminal, and replies with the search result (e.g. see Patent Publication JP-A-2008-140306).
In the above-mentioned prior art, however, the scale of the system increases, and if a number of clients managed by the connection management server, and a number of connected thin client terminals increase, load on the connection management server becomes high and service may drop, such as a time lag in responding to a request from a thin client terminal.